I watched an interview that Patrick Coffin did with child psychiatrist, Dr. Mark McDonald where he spoke about an increase of, what he called, ‘untethered anxiety’, in his young patients, since the onset of the Covid pandemic. Where this anxiety was free floating and not anchored to some specific issue, in their lives, it produced ‘dread’ as opposed to ‘fear’. This psychological state is a precursor to deep depression and mental illness. Dr. McDonald found it hard to fathom how in the name of ‘Covid public health’ the medical establishment were knowingly visiting this plague on the younger members of society. He said that, although he would not consider himself ‘religious,’ he would class some of the activities of our current social institutions as ‘evil’.
Some medical research has concluded that prolonged exposure to hard core pornography can change the physical neurological structures of our brain. What about the long-term effects of the ‘fear porn’ that is being peddled by practitioners of the pandemic narrative? As per Dr. McDonald, the endless publishing of ‘case’ numbers and death projections, all given without context or critique, contributes to dangerous levels of ‘dread’. Porn, of any type, gives us a firmware downgrade. So are the psyches, of the innocent patients of Dr. McDonald, being slaughtered by the purveyors of this form of profanity?
In this world there are various types of history, ie: political history, economic history, medical history but there is one type that is often ignored or ‘poo-pooed’ and that is spiritual history. Dr. McDonald seems to intuit this in his comment on the ‘evil’ that is being perpetrated, since evil is not a moral or medical category but a spiritual category. There is the observation that those who don’t have a grasp of history are doomed to repeat it.
The Orthodox priest, Father Seraphim Rose, in his book ‘Nihilism’, talks about ‘nameless anxiety’, which has tethers of continuity to Dr. Mc Donald’s ‘untethered anxiety’. Nameless anxiety leads to a fear of “falling out of being”. This anxiety has two aspects. One is about facing physical non-existence and the other is that it is absurd to ask any questions about purpose and love. There are only non-answers floating about in the abyss of non-entities. In the movie “Back to the Future”, Marty McFly starts to dissolve into non-being when it looks like his parents will never meet and have their first date. He needs their love to exist, in order for him to be. For Father Seraphim, dissolving us into non-being, in the acid of evil, is the job description of the Devil. The Devil works to annul our creation. In Romans 6:23, St Paul puts it this way, “The wages of sin (evil) is death (non-being)”. The Devil is enthusiastically leading the cheerleading section for both the demise of Marty McFly, and you and I.
The Christian doctrine of creation “ex nihilo” comes to our rescue. For God did not create the world out of Himself, or some pre-existent matter, or primal chaos but out of ‘nothing’. By the sheer power of his omnipotent Word, He called us into existence from absolute non-existence! Evil cannot create, it can only destroy, it can only try and stage a sick parody of a reverse creation.
That same omnipotent Word, who was present at the original Creation, can speak into the non-being that has polluted our lives and call us back into full existence. The words of Jesus are the source of our salvation from non-being (death). In some way or another we are all Marty McFly’s. In John 6:68 the Apostle Peter says, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
The Covid crisis is multi layered. The surface waves are all about managing a respiratory viral infection but there are deeper and more sinister currents lurking beneath those waves, for whom our destruction is in their gameplan. The fact that the political and religious institutions, that we thought offered some stability, have been so easily caught in the rip-tides of the Covid currents can put us in a state of ‘untethered anxiety’, but in the ongoing narrative of our Spiritual history, we have the mentor who suffered the ultimate anxiety and betrayal by the system, death on a cross, and lived to tell the tale.
images courtesy of pixabay - anxiety and cross.
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